After five years of ruling Canada with a minority government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives vaulted to majority rule on May 2, 2011, in federal elections that resulted in dramatic changes for all of the country’s main political parties. The Conservatives were predicted to win, but in taking 166 seats (a gain of 23) and tallying nearly 40 percent of the popular vote, they surpassed expectations. The election’s other big winner was the New Democratic Party (NDP). After having long played a secondary role in national politics, the NDP, led by Jack Layton, leapt from 37 seats in the 2008 election to 103, the great majority of them gained in Quebec at the expense of that province’s long-dominant separatist party, the Bloc Québécois. In dropping from 49 seats to just 4, the Bloc Québécois tumbled into obscurity, prompting the resignation of its leader, Gilles Duceppe, who failed to be reelected in his own riding (district). The Liberal Party also suffered a historic electoral setback, finishing third for the first time since Canada’s confederation, polling less than 20 percent of the popular vote, and dropping from 77 seats in the 2008 election to 34 in 2011, a catastrophic result for the party that ruled Canada for most of the 20th century. Michael Ignatieff, leading the Liberal campaign for the first time, also lost in his own riding and was contrite in defeat: “Democracy teaches hard lessons,” he said, “and we have to learn them all.” Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens, took solace in her own election, though she was the only member of her party to gain a seat in the House of Commons.

Harper ran a disciplined, low-key campaign during which he took only four questions per day from reporters. The Conservatives’ percentage of the popular vote increased for the third consecutive election, a development many observers attributed to Canadians’ desire for stability. The Conservatives also benefitted from the “orange wave” surge of the NDP, which resulted in vote splitting with Liberals and tipped a number of close three-way elections in favour of the Conservatives, who made notable gains in the Liberal stronghold of Ontario, especially in Greater Toronto. Much of the NDP’s success was attributed to the personal popularity of Layton, which was particularly in evidence in Quebec, where voters seemed to have lost faith in the Bloc Québécois.

This was the fourth federal election in seven years for Canadians. The immediate impetus for the election was the loss of a vote of confidence by Harper’s Conservative government on March 25, 2011. Earlier in March a House of Commons committee had found Harper’s minority government to be in contempt of Parliament after it failed to provide MPs with sufficient budgetary information relating to the costs of government proposals for anticrime programs, corporate tax cuts, and plans to purchase fighter jets from the United States. The no-confidence vote, proposed by Liberal Party leader Ignatieff, passed 156 to 145, forcing Harper to ask Gov.-Gen. David Johnston to dissolve Parliament and setting the stage for the election.

At the outset of the campaign, Harper claimed that Canadians were disappointed to have to go the polls again so soon after the last election. He characterized the election as a choice between continued stability under the Conservative government and the risky prospect of coalition rule by the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP) with the support of the Bloc Québécois. Earlier in his tenure, Harper had already seen the value of painting coalition rule as dangerous. In 2008, only weeks after having won 143 out of 308 seats in the October federal elections and re-forming their minority government, Harper and the Conservatives introduced a budget update that contained new policies, including the suspension of programs to achieve pay equity between women and men, the temporary suspension of the federal public sector’s right to strike over wage issues, and limitations on public financing for political parties. To block this program, the three principal opposition parties threatened a no-confidence vote to bring down Harper’s government and signed a mutual pledge to replace it with a Liberal-NDP coalition government to be headed by Stéphane Dion, with the guaranteed support of the Bloc Québécois on confidence matters for 18 months. To avoid a vote, Harper requested that Parliament be prorogued. When it returned to session in late January 2009, the government introduced a new budget update that included an economic stimulus package. The Liberals agreed to support the budget in exchange for quarterly budget reports to come, which would provide opportunities for confidence votes. In the process, however, most Canadians had shown little interest in the prospect of coalition rule. As Harper maligned the notion of coalition rule during the 2011 campaign, however, Bloc Québécois leader Duceppe was quick to remind voters that Harper had cosigned a letter in 2004 indicating that the Conservatives, the NDP, and the Bloc Québécois were in “close consultation” regarding the future of the government should then prime minister Paul Martin and the Liberals lose power.

Canada had survived the global economic downturn that began in 2008 better than most of its partners in the Group of Eight (G8), partly because of the country’s closely regulated banking system. Harper argued that he had ably shepherded the Canadian economy through these rough times and deserved the opportunity to continue to lead, and early opinion polls put the Conservatives ahead by about 10 percent. The Conservative platform, built upon the budget proposed by the government on March 22, still had as its linchpins spending cuts and reductions in the tax rate for corporations. It also continued to include the controversial proposal to purchase 65 fighter jets from the United States, one of the largest military procurements in Canadian history; however, it offered a new set of spending pledges—from compensation for sales-tax changes in Quebec to the creation of a new national park. Moreover, it promised to balance the federal budget by 2014–15, a year earlier than it had previously proposed, a goal Harper said would be met by reductions in government operating costs. In the middle of the campaign, the Conservatives were put on the defensive by renewed allegations of profligate spending in the hosting of the G8 and Group of 20 summits during the summer of 2010.

In contrast, the Liberal Party platform promised to focus on stimulating the economy while offering a basket of social programs whose centrepiece, the “Family Pack,” promised to provide enhanced care for the elderly, financial assistance for university students, and job training, to be funded by reversals in the corporate tax cuts passed by the Conservatives. The Liberal plank also included a cap-and-trade plan targeted at reducing Canadian greenhouse emissions to one-fifth of 1990s levels by 2050. Additionally, the Liberals pledged to cancel the purchase of the 65 fighter jets and to initiate a new study of the country’s fighter plane needs. The Liberal campaign effort was the first to be headed by Ignatieff, a former history professor and television commentator who replaced Dion as the party’s leader in late 2008, after the Liberal’s weak (just over 26 percent) showing in the election and the collapse of the short-term plan for a coalition government. There was talk that Ignatieff and Harper might meet in a one-on-one debate (though it never came to fruition), the mere suggestion of which some pundits argued had heightened Ignatieff’s stature, casting him in the role of alternative prime minister.

In the event, the debates—one in English (on April 12) and one in French (April 13)—included Harper, Ignatieff, the Bloc Québécois’s Duceppe, and NDP leader Jack Layton, but not Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, which had garnered nearly one million votes in the 2008 election but no representation in the House of Commons. The Bloc Québécois remained principally a regional party, but, in addition to its demand for $2.2 billion (Canadian) in compensation for harmonizing Quebec’s sales tax, the party’s platform included a call for increased support of the forest industry, for an allocation of $750 million to develop green energy, for imposing special surtaxes on those earning more $150,000 annually, and for the elimination of tax shelters for banks and big businesses. The NDP platform called for cuts in federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and increased spending on renewable energy projects, for an increase in the corporate tax rate from 16.5 percent to 19.5 percent and a decrease in the small business tax rate for 11 percent to 9 percent, for a renewed focus on health care issues, and for increased pension benefits. May and the Greens proposed a carbon tax, federal funding for local green start-up businesses, a reduction in income taxes—including the elimination of personal taxes for those earning $20,000 or less annually—the creation of jobs through investment in renewable energy, railway expansion, and the retrofitting of buildings, and a increase in workplace child-care facilities.

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